This was because the Jurassic Park movies, namely, came out before the discovery was made. :3 According to what I've read recently, anyway, most of the velociraptor-types just looked like overgrown birds. XD

Well it's easy for me because I'm friends with the artist, but the usually signs which are quite hard to see is that females usually have smaller ridges above the eyes, shorter feathers, a less pronounced cloacal region and are usually slightly bigger than the males.

Since you have advanced crit encouraged, I will first say that I love the inclusion of the steering feathers on the tail and forearms. however, the head looks a little low and long for a deinonychus. The overall shape is right, it just needs to be a little deeper in height, and not so much in length. As it is, it seems a bit like a cross between a deinonychus and a velociraptor (velociraptors having unusually long and low skulls for the dromeaosaur family.) Overall Deinonychus was actually one of the more robust from that family if I remember correctly, which leads me to think that the neck may also be a bit meatier, but we are going from bones here.

There's really not that much you can do about it now, I suppose, short of shopping it, but that wouldn't do much for the hardcopy, so I'm willing to accept and love it the way it is. More of a "maybe next time" crit.

Also next time you try prismacolours, you might want to experiment with a colourless blender. They can be found in the same aisle usually, appearing in packs of two as plain wood coloured pencils with clear wax leads. These can be used to break down, blend and saturate the pigments leading to a more vivid, painting-like pencil piece. I love blenders, use them in my every colour piece and possibly couldn't live without them.

That's really more of a stylistic preference, but at $2 a pack, they might be worth some experimenting around with. They take Prismas from the realm of "That's awesome coloured pencil!" to "THAT'S coloured pencil?!!"

Thanks for the comments. I went off a fairly new Greg Paul skull reconstruction here so I was more or less unaware that it was inaccurate, but I will reexamine it. A lot of the perceived length of it is due to the neck jutting out behind it (the skull ends where the end of the jaw rounds off).

I have experimented with colorless blenders in the past, and while they do make my artwork look more painted and saturated they also seem to sometimes make them unrealistically bright and vivid. I've found that overall I prefer to not use them, since I feel that my art looks more naturalistic this way.

Thanks again for the critique; there aren't many people who attempt to give anything of worth even when I select advanced crit.

Ixerin is actually a she though. And yes she's in a good mood in this piece. I created her intentionally to look the way she does, but her exact characterization is partially a product of my style, of course.

There's supposed to be a roughly-defined hilltop behind her at the very bottom of the shadow from the trees, which is supposed to make the sea and the forest look further in the distance. I guess it must not be defined well enough, though.